Fringe's Music to Math Connection Contains as Much Fact as Fiction

The latest episode of Fox's hit show Fringe once again blurred the line between fact and fiction. "The Equation" may have had a killer ending (we'll debunk humans' potential to walk through walls in a later installment), but the overall plot was what proved interesting. Two experts take a closer look at the correlation between math and music.

A serial kidnapper has a habit of snatching only those who are masterminds in their respective fields, from engineers to astrophysicists. This kidnapper had abducted two very different people--Ben, a child piano prodigy who is composing a piece of music, and Dashiell, a now-institutionalized genius struggling to complete a mathematical equation--for a singular purpose. It doesn't take long for the link between music and math to build.

"Music and mathematics are two completely different disciplines--at first sight," says Michael Beer, a mathematician and statistician based in Switzerland. "Music is more than just sound and harmony, and mathematics transcends the physical world." According to him, music often has mathematical structures and characteristics, and many artistic aspects can be seen in math.

In fact, a link between the two has been found with basic brain functioning. Dave Rusin, associate professor of mathematics at Northern Illinois University, says that with an fMRI, it is possible to see that the same part of the brain lights up when solving an arithmetic problem as does when analyzing a Bach fugue.

But this doesn't mean that exposing your baby to Mozart will make him a math whiz. "Some people have taken what has generally been recognized as an informal connection between two fields, and overblown it," Rusin explains.

Like Beer, Rusin does agree that bringing the fields together could increase the understanding of both disciplines. One example is a connection of aesthetics. "People speak of math in the same ways as they speak of classical music," Rusin, who studied the piano, says. "Form, structure, symmetry. Those words are used both for a Schubert symphony and a mathematics paper."

The folks at Fringe don't just make a few anecdotal connections between math and music. In the plot of "The Equation," the two are inseparable. Ben's unfinished song and Dashiell's unfinished equation are essentially the same thing--just in different formats. In fact, in the episode, the mad scientist Peter Bishop notices that the mathematical equation repeats a certain sign over and over; he discovers that it is a rhythm. He then converts it into musical notation, right there on the piano.

Peter goes on to say that music is a mathematical language and that chords "have numerical values" and "are all just fractions and variables."

That's quite accurate, according to Rusin. "It's possible to actually do a mathematical study of some aspects of music--what makes music 'music' and not just noise. There's an organized structure to it and there are specific notes. Those notes have frequency, and a series of notes create a chord, and only some chords sound better than others."

You can use math to impose structure on a musical composition, Rusin says. In fact, many composers have used patterns such as the Fibonacci number sequence in their musical endeavors.

Although music can be seen as an equation, per se, it doesn't mean that what happened on Fringe is possible. When Ben finally completes his song, it is processed and decoded and turned directly into a legitimate equation.

"It would be possible to take a message and break it down into binary strings--a series of 1s and 0s--and then take that data and reprocess it as a sound format," Rusin says. "But it could only be a random succession of keystrokes. It's not possible to take useful information that was not of a musical nature and somehow transmit it in a really musical way." In much the same way, nothing that has meaning musically can turn into a groundbreaking scientific equation.

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